A new biography reaffirms Machiavelli’s value to modern political
practitioners, not least Barack Obama, says Keith Miller.

There is a select canon of historical figures whose thinking has earned them the epithet “modern”. Usually this means they are deemed to have rid themselves of some set of illusions cherished by their contemporaries (though it is surprising how many cynics, lechers and agnostics can be found in almost any age). Sometimes, though, it means that their illusions are a neat mirror of ours – and of course we would be the last people to recognise that.

Niccolò Machiavelli, born in 1469, more than earns his place in the ahead-of-his-time club. In the best known portrait of him, by Santi di Tito, he even looks modern, furtive and ratlike, as if he’s about to hack your email. He spent his career near the sharp end of Florentine politics during what must have been one of the most interesting couple of decades in the whole of European history. In quieter moments he drafted two constitutions for a putative restoration of that fair city’s republic, and wrote several books, including two thunderously influential ones: the Discorsi, ostensibly a commentary on Livy which in fact constituted by far the subtlest analysis yet attempted of politics in antiquity; and Concerning Principalities, better known by its posthumous title The Prince.

That’s quite a hinterland. But the latter book in particular swiftly garnered a certain infamy, thanks in large part, as Philip Bobbitt points out in his rip-roaring commentary, to a somewhat hysterical counterblast published by the French essayist Innocent Gentillet in 1576, which beat Machiavelli himself to an English readership and set the satanic tone for 200 years of Italophobia, among other things (the reason we don’t do “The Duchess of Malbork” and “The Merchant of Vienna” for A-level is largely because British writers believed Italian political life really was the way Machiavelli – or rather the devilish cartoon of Machiavelli pushed by the likes of Gentillet – had described it).

In fact, as Bobbitt plausibly claims, Machiavelli was not in the business of mere description; nor was The Prince only worth reading if you were a prince, or aspired to be one. History was the stuff of allegory and myth, a seam to be mined for broad-brush exemplars – the soldierly self-control evinced by the elites of Republican Rome, the timely ruthlessness of Cesare Borgia in the late 15th century. The real subtlety of thought – and along with this came a certain elegant opacity of language, one reason Machiavelli has divided scholarly opinion ever since – lay in the book’s exploration of wide political questions. How shall we live?

One thing that’s quite striking about The Prince is that, while he’s fairly explicit that the ruler of a princely state can – indeed must – be in some senses above the law, Machiavelli is no great fan of autocracy. There are passages of buttock-clenching flattery aimed at the Medici, de facto rulers of the notionally republican Florence since the early 15th century – and at others – but not many by the standards of the time: this is not one of those treatises that tells the young prince he’s got to read Cicero or practise falconry or learn the lute – for that, check out Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.

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Bobbitt and many other modern commentators see Machiavelli as the apostle of “constitutionalism”, the notion that the state is a political entity that transcends any individual associated with it. What he is calling for is a “neoclassical” state, which will have the ability to withstand switches in fortune and the waxing and waning of human talents, and thereby to endure as long as the Roman Republic or the constitutional monarchy of Sparta.

When the Medici’s feet were back under the table both in Florence (after a short republican entr’acte at the turn of the 15th century) and, thanks to the Medici pope Leo X, in Rome, Machiavelli was twice commissioned to design a constitution for Florence. In both instances he opted for a version of the system that had merely seemed to operate under the Medici – guild delegates, elected for life on to large, middling and small councils, led by a “standard-bearer” (gonfaloniere) elected for a finite term. The ultimate source of this was Republican Rome, where honour and power were carefully rationed, and different deliberative bodies gave a voice to different social strata: the senatorial elites in the comitia curiata, the broader populace in the comitia plebis. The three-councils bit was strongly reminiscent of Venice (a “constitutional state” which seems not much to interest Bobbitt, for some reason); though there the head of state ruled for life.

None of it would come to pass, however; in 1530, after another republican interlude, the Medici swathed themselves in ermine and, backed up by Habsburg muscle, retook the throne as Grand Dukes of Tuscany. Florence slid into a genteel decline thereafter, though it continued to be renowned for its excellent leather goods. As for Machiavelli, he died in 1527, the year the Holy Roman Emperor’s troops ravaged Rome and the second Medici pope Clement VII scuttled off into brief exile. It would have been good to know what he made of all that. But his work lived on (The Prince wasn’t even published until 1531), and has lived on ever since, arousing fierce hostility and attracting misplaced admiration, sparking face-offs in the groves of academe and smackdowns in the back offices that reverberate today. In the 18th century Frederick the Great of Prussia published The Anti-Machiavel, edited by Voltaire, who had an enduring fondness for the kaiser. It wasn’t an impersonal responsibility to the state that bound the sovereign, but a paternalistic duty of care to the people; it behove the prince to live virtuously, rather than merely to seem to do so, as the Italian had suggested.

In fact, Machiavelli is much subtler than that. A key word in both The Prince and the Discorsi is virtù, a baggier and more informal thing than its Latin grandpa virtus, which is pretty much a mixture of what we mean when we say “virtue” and what we mean when we say “manliness” – a rather austere and inflexible and faintly ridiculous quality (picture the Roman general Manius Curius Dentatus refusing an offer of gold to go over to the Samnites while munching on a supper of turnips). Virtù has a more pragmatic aroma – it means knowing when to be and when to seem, when to advance and when to retreat. It’s a pretty Italian concept, in short, though Mussolini restored its pompous classical sense – or maybe he just pretended to.

It’s easy to deprecate this exaltation of foxlike cunning; to put it no higher, a state that depends on secrecy and deceit for its preservation can’t be called a straightforwardly healthy one. But the Machiavellian prince has to take all this on his shoulders. Indeed, Barack Obama, who gravely affects a tacit awareness of all the compromises made under his presidency, is a much more Machiavellian politician than the blithely self-deceptive Tony Blair, who genuinely seemed to see no disconnection between his own urgings and the good of the state.

Bobbitt’s book is not primarily concerned with welding his subject on to the contemporary political landscape; he situates Machiavelli’s enduring importance at a deeper level: in his cyclical conception of history, in his insistence that we be perpetually ready for opportunity and change. An eminent jurist and former political flack, he does a good job of shuttling between the fine mesh of detail and the big picture.

The Garments of Court and Palace is an engaging book, and somehow a very passionate one. But it’s cranky in some of its historical judgments (the idea that the princely state was an Italian invention would have come as quite a surprise to William the Conqueror, say); clumsy in some of its translations – a capitano is not at all the same as a captain; and, frankly, a bit bonkers in a final chapter that attempts to consider what Machiavelli would have made of the postmodern “market state”.

If you can spare the time, read it alongside Corrado Vivanti’s drier, more linear, less opinionated but more informative and much more level-headed “intellectual biography”. And don’t forget to read Machiavelli himself. The luscious 2007 Duncan Baird edition of The Prince has essays by Macaulay and Isaiah Berlin, as well as some nice pictures.